The whole "year-end" thing has been getting on my nerves this year. My main complaint is that it is like Christmas at department stores....it starts about 6 weeks before it should. To that end I've been steadfast in holding out until the actual year end to put out any sort of list. My other complaint involves the fact that 80% of lists seem to revolve around the same handful of artists, which in my mind kind of ruins the whole point of the "diversity" of blogs. We all get the fact that TV on the Radio is fucking awesome. Printing it for the 1200th time does no one any good.
BUT....i digress. The point to this post is that the Marathon Packs Blog has put together four year-end mixes that I think everyone should download. They are completely and utterly bad ass. And if you are overwhelmed with all of the names being thrown around on "best of" lists and albums you "must check out", this is a godsend. The mixes, all four of them, can be found right here. There is a slight pain-in-the-ass factor. Because they spend a lot of time on really perfect transitions, each mix is packaged as an individual mp3 file. i.e. tracks are not separated. But it's a small price to pay for some amazing mixes.
Technical note: Because of high demand they had to stop hosting the files and put them on a "yousendit" server. These download in some odd format that iTunes will not open. There is a simple fix. Just open the file properties, and add ".mp3" to the end of the file name.